The Stranger House (15 page)

“Perhaps terror, hunger, thirst, angry voices, metal-shod feet tramping, mailed fists banging, are necessary for a true appreciation
of that sort of thing,”
she said.

“True,” he said, “So is it recorded that Father Simeon ever took refuge here?”

“It’s recorded that the house was searched at least twice, including this chamber, and no trace of him was found,” she said, “Why so interested in Father Simeon?”

“I’m not really. But your father seemed a little sensitive on the subject.”

“Not without cause. A priest in a Catholic family is often as much a cause for concern as pride, as perhaps your own family discovered.”

She was sharp.

“But you must be impatient to get a start,” she went on, “Follow me, please.”

She walked away with an effortless almost gliding motion he found so much more affective than any seductive hip-waggling could have been.

The study was on the same floor as the gallery, a broad high room though with only one window. Against the side walls stood a pair of matching bookcases in dark oak. From the window he could see the plume of smoke still rising above the Forge, and further below, across the river, the stubby chimneys of the Stranger House. But Madero only spared the view a passing glance. His main attention was focused on the desk.

Here was God’s plenty. Half a dozen octavo volumes, cased in leather. Three folio ledgers. An abundance of loose sheets of varying sizes in two open box files.

For a moment he felt disturbed by such liberal cooperation, as perhaps a bright mouse might scenting the ripe cheese so generously scattered over the floor of the trap.

But in some things mice and men, bright or not, have no choice.

“Here’s the letter of agreement,” said Frek, “Sorry.”

“No need to be. Your father’s a wise man,” he said, scribbling his signature.

“Have you read it properly?” she asked doubtfully.

“I heard what your father said it contained. To study it would be both redundant and offensive,” he said, handing her the paper.

Their fingers touched. To prolong the contact, he did not let go immediately.

“I’m grateful for your help,” he said.

“How do you know you’ve had it?” she said, pulling the paper from his hand, “If you turn left out of here then left again into a short corridor, you’ll find a bathroom first on the right. I think that’s all, unless you have any questions?”

“No. You have given me all that I want. I shall have no excuse for not getting down to some good productive work, unless I let myself be distracted by the view.”

It was not consciously intended as a clumsy compliment but he realized that was how it sounded even before her eyebrows arched. He felt himself flushing under that amused gaze and turned to look out of the window at the panorama of valley and hills which was what he had consciously been referring to anyway.

“Yes, it is lovely countryside, beautiful and brutal by turns,” said Frek, as if she valued both qualities equally.

The window was slightly open and he heard voices below. Looking down, he saw directly below him the Range Rover parked outside the front door. Gerald and Sister Angelica were getting into it. A moment later, the engine started and the car pulled away.

“Now that’s interesting,” said Madero.

Where the car had been standing was a mosaic in the form of an eight-pointed star with at its centre a circle of gold infilled with white. There were letters printed both in the white and on the gold margin.

“You recognize it, of course?”

A test? He closed his eyes, remembered what Max had told him, ran his mental eye over the possibilities and said, “The Order of Pius IX.
Virtuti et Merito.”

“Well done. My grandfather received it years ago, long before I was born. My great-grandfather, the one who insisted on the portrait in uniform, again wanted to mark the distinction with another painting. Grandfather refused, but finally compromised on a permanent reproduction of the award itself. Even here he insisted that the commemorative design should be set at ground level where people would tread on it and only see it if humble enough to lower their gaze. In fact this room gives the best view. It’s a pebble mosaic, using stones from local Irish Sea beaches. You saw the designer briefly when we first met. Thor Winander, down at the Forge.”

“A talented man.”

“Oh yes. Thor has many talents,” she said with her secretive little smile, “Now I’ll leave you to get down to work or admire the view as you please. Till lunch, then.”

She left. It would have been easy to indulge his fantasies a little longer, but at the seminary he’d been famous for his concentration. Before the door closed, he was riffling through the loose sheets. Builder’s plans, household accounts, letters in various hands.

He put them to one side and opened the first of the leather-bound volumes. The page before him was covered in a minuscule scrawl. He took a powerful magnifying glass out of his briefcase and began to read.

Within a very few minutes all residual thought of Frek and her lily-white flesh had vanished from his mind.

Sam stood at the open end of the smithy and removed her Ray-Bans to let her eyes adjust to the change of light.

The scene before her was like an old painting, all heavy shadow and lurid glow. Winander was shovelling coals on to a forge. The air was heavy with the pungent smell of fire and hot metal.

“There you are,” said Winander, “Just as well that wanked-out priest got a lift. He looked fit to collapse.”

He dropped the shovel with a clatter that made Sam start. She tried to conceal the movement but he grinned to let her know he’d noticed, then went to a cool-box on a trestle at the back of the smithy and took out a can of beer.

“Need to keep your liquor level up in here,” he said, “Catch.”

He tossed her the can which she caught with one-handed ease. It was ice cold and the label boasted it was the strongest Australian lager you could buy.

“You trying to stereotype me, Mr Winander?” she said.

“No. I’m not that subtle. The stuff was on offer last time I got into a supermarket. Never pass up on a bargain, Miss Flood.”

He raised his eyebrows comically as he spoke. His eyes had a distinctly flirtatious twinkle. How did he get it there? she asked herself. With an eye-dropper?

“Bit hard on Mr Madero, aren’t you? Calling him a ‘wanked-out priest’?” she said.

“Did I say wanked-out? I meant dropped-out,” he said, “Decided there were better ways of spending his life than wearing a skirt and pretending he never got horny. Perhaps I did mean wanked out.”

He ripped the ring-pull off a can, raised it high and let the beer arc into his mouth. Some of it ran down his cheeks and jaw on to his body. He was sucking his belly in, she noticed. Did he really think he was impressing her?

As if sensing a challenge, he set down his can and moved back to the forge where he put his right foot on a set of foot-bellows and began to pump the dull red coals to a white-hot heat.

It was a pretty effective performance, she had to admit. His skin was almost as brown as her own, his torso still slab muscled despite the waistline sag. His plentiful body hair was rejuvenated from grey to ruddy gold by the reflected fire. With each bend of the knee she could see the contours of his huge thigh muscle outlined against his trousers before he drove his foot down in a rhythmic movement which a susceptible woman might find erotically mesmeric.

And where, she wondered, sucking at her lager, did these mesmerized women pay the price of their susceptibilities? Did he take them here in the heat of the forge, creating Thor-like thunder by beating his hammer against the huge anvil as he grappled them close, then mocking their ecstatic cries as he entered by plunging a
length of glowing metal into the cooling trough? Or did the great god carry them up to his god-size bed?

Or was he past all that and just enjoying talking the talk even though he could no longer walk the walk? Geriatric sexuality wasn’t an area she had much experience of. Unlike Martie, she hadn’t had to fight the dirty old dons off. Sometimes basilisk eyes came in useful.

She yawned widely, then said, “Is that good for your heart with the extra weight you’re carrying? I’d really like to hear what you can tell me about my namesake before you drop dead.”

He stopped straightaway. To do him justice he didn’t seem out of breath. Also he smiled as if acknowledging a telling stroke and let his belly bulge over his waist band.

“Let’s get to it then,” he said, “You look ready for a refill.”

He tossed her another can. Rather to her surprise she realized he was right and the first one was empty. He led her out of a door at the back of the smithy into a cobbled courtyard. Here she could see the rear of the main house and alongside it what had probably been a barn but which now had wide plate-glass windows to admit light into what looked like an artist’s workshop.

The yard itself was scattered with the materials of his trade, or rather his trades. Lumps of wood, chunks of rock, a tubful of seashells, another of polished stones, some wrought-iron garden tables and chairs, and a small menagerie of delicate and detailed wildlife in various metals. But the thing which caught the eye was a tree stump standing upright on the cobbles and leaning back against the smithy wall.

The barkless and sun-bleached surface of the bole curved and twisted with a kind of monumental muscularity, as if some huge beast were trying to escape from
the confining wood, an impression confirmed by the topmost section which was in the process of being carved into a gaping-jawed wolf’s head. It was both repellent and compulsively attractive.

Sam went close and ran her hands over the sinuous undulations, feeling the grain against her skin.

“Irresistible, isn’t it? Not a gender thing either. Men and women both the same,” said Winander close behind her.

“It’s the Wolf-Head Cross, isn’t it? The other one I read about in Peter K.’s
Guide.”

“Now why should you think that?”

She peered at the residual branches which formed an irregular stubby cross bar.

“The nail holes are a bit of a give-away,” she said, “Did you put them there?”

“Nail holes? What an imagination you have! A few beetle holes perhaps. It’s exactly as it was when we dragged it out of the Moss, except a bit drier.”

“The Moss? Mecklin Moss, would that be?”

“You’re remarkably well informed for a stranger,” said Winander, “If you stay another couple of days, we’ll have to elect you queen. Yes, it was Mecklin. I was helping a neighbour haul out a beast of his that had got bogged down when we chanced upon this. Something in that bit of bog must have preserved it, I don’t know how. I hauled it out, cleaned it up and left it standing here till it told me what it wanted to be.”

“And it told you, wolf?”

“Not really. In fact it was Frek Woollass who came up with that idea. She saw something lupine in the twist of the grain. She offered to commission me. I said I didn’t want her money just her body so we shook hands
on that. As many hours modelling for me as I took on the wolf head.”

“So you’ve been dragging your feet,” suggested Sam.

“Perish the unprofessional thought!’ said Winander, twinkling, “I’ve had to prepare a site too. She wants her grandfather to have a view of it from his window. Gerry, her dad, isn’t keen on having a view of it from anywhere. Too pagan for his taste. But like most young women of my acquaintance, it’s Frek who calls the tune. So it will be in place as promised before she goes back to Cambridge which is this coming weekend.”

“Cambridge? You mean the university?”

“That’s the one. Our Frek is a real-life don. Eddas and sagas and Nordic mythology’s her thing, hence maybe her fancy for the wolf. You don’t seem impressed?”

“Seems a waste of good money teaching that stuff at university,” she said.

“An opinion I’d keep to yourself if Frek’s around,” he said, “Anyway, this is promised, but if anything else takes your fancy, we’ll see if we can work out a deal.”

Another twinkle. He was irrepressible she thought as he flung open the double barn door and led her into the workshop. This was relatively tidy after the yard. Bang in the middle, lit by the rectangle of light falling in through the open door was a wide-eyed marble angel brooding over a headstone. Sam stood before it, struck by a sense of familiarity stopping short of recognition. She lowered her gaze to read the inscription:

“This the boy they buried yesterday?” she said.

“Yes. Almost done. I’ll be setting it up later.”

“Nice inscription,” she said.

“Milton. If you knew Billy, you might think it a touch ironical.”

He gave her a twinkle as if expecting curiosity about the boy.

Instead she asked, “So what are you, Mr Winander—international artist or village jobbing craftsman, like your ancestors, according to Peter K?”

He was hard to put down.

“From the stuff I see winning the Turner Prize year after year, the latter is the nobler designation. I am proud of the fact that once upon a time round here the Winanders did everything that needed to be done with hammer and chisel and saw and adze. First Winander son was the blacksmith, second the mason, third the carpenter.”

“What did they do with daughters? Stake them out on a hillside?”

“You’ve definitely been reading up on us,” he laughed.

“So what number son are you?”

“I was unique,” he said, “So I had to do it all.”

“Including the wild pranks I read about in the
Guide?”

“Especially the pranks. Seen enough?”

“I reckon.”

As she turned from the memorial she noticed something on the floor concealed by a piece of sacking. She pulled it aside and found herself looking at a reclining nude, half life-size, in some kind of creamy, almost white wood. It was a piece full of energy with the violent chisel marks clearly visible and nothing classical in the pose. It was blatantly sexual, legs splayed, vulva boldly gouged.
Yet it had the same pensive features as the marble angel. And suddenly she knew whose they were.